Switching up Your Social Strategy
Long gone are the days of set-it-and-forget-it content planning. With the algorithms and constantly changing trends, you might even feel like you can't plan too far ahead. This is a reasonable thought. However, your strategy shouldn't be based on trends and algorithms in the first place. Your strategy should be based on your ICA’s needs, pain points, the results you help them create, and your offers.
Why?
If we base our strategy on trends and algorithms we could very well find ourselves in a game of catch-up pretty quickly. But if we focus on the needs of our ICA we're more likely to relate to them faster and easier. In this blog post, I'm going to talk about:
How often should you change things?
WHAT should you change?
Order of operations
How to know if things are working or NOT working
Before we move on, let's define a few things so that we're on the same page
Content Planning: Lay out what types of media or materials you'll create to share with the public.
Content Strategy: The plan you create for your content to help you achieve your business goals.
How often should you plan your content?
To talk about how often we should change things, we first need to address how often we should plan or assess our content strategy. In my opinion, you should be evaluating your content strategy each month based on what happened the previous month. This means checking your insights on social and on your website. What are your top posts from the month? What page got the most views this month?
In addition to doing an insights deep dive at the beginning of each month for the previous month. You should have a big-picture view of the year mapped out as well. This should include things like:
Launches
Events
Prep time
Nurturing
Time off
Planning these things out from a birds-eye view will help you ensure you're not overwhelming yourself throughout the year with back-to-back launches or events. It will also allow you to ensure that you have time to prepare and nurture your audience between launches.
The bottom line on planning: Take the time to do a big planning session once a year or even quarterly for all of the big things. Then, evaluate things each month from there to see how things are going based on insights.
How often should you change your social media strategy?
Okay, okay, now for what you came for, how often should you mix things up? If you didn't get the hint above, you should not be implementing any significant changes mid-month. You need to give your strategy time to play out. You need to give your content time to circulate in the algorithm. You have to get creative with how you repurpose and share the same content to get the message across.
The bottom line on changing your strategy: Give it a full month before you change anything major.
Now I know what you're thinking, and it's this: "She said anything major, so that means we can change things, but WHAT?!"
What should you change in your social media strategy when experimenting?
Now, there are some things you can tweak throughout the month to influence how your content might perform. Those things are:
Your hashtags - remember, RELEVANCY is the name of the game here. Trending hashtags are great THIS WEEK, but they'll do almost nothing for you if they don't continue to trend. So, to get your content to show up when people are searching for it, you need to keep your hashtags relevant to your content, your services/offers, and your ICA.
Your content type - by this, I mean a Reel vs. a static graphic vs. a carousel vs. a live vs. story. To see an example of switching your content type with the same info, check out these two posts on my IG. Post 1 and post 2, are both about the EXACT same thing, even the captions are similar.
Hooks - Are your captions or the first few seconds of your videos stopping the scroll and pulling people in? Adjust your content to ensure you're stopping the scroll with a HOOK.
Your interactions - are you engaging with others? Are you replying to comments people have taken the time to leave you? Are you interacting with people in your industry and outside of it or in parallel industries?
The bottom line on making changes: Make small tweaks change the content TYPE and interact more before you change your topic or plan.
Order of operations in social media strategy changes
Now that we know WHAT to tweak, we need to discuss in what ORDER we should attempt these tweaks. Following an order of operations will ensure we use our time wisely.
1. Interactions: AKA engagement. I recently saw this quote in an article from Buffer: "Without engagement, social media is just media." We didn't get on social media for a one-way experience; we got on social media seeking connections with people and other brands. The other reason engagement is important is that social platforms have consistently said more engagement = more reach. And isn't reaching more people the goal of social usually?
Reach isn't the only reason to interact more. The whole reason we're on social media again is to connect AND build relationships. We can use social to learn from our audience and community.
2. Hooks: Now is the time to examine the content you've been putting into the world. Look at it and put yourself in your ICA's shoes. Would you stop scrolling to consume what you put out? You could even take this further and ask a friend or someone close to you to audit the post.
The key to a good hook is intrigue. Get your audience to be curious about what you have to share.
3. Hashtags: I'm not suggesting you go back through your old posts and change the hashtags you used already. You could do this, but just know that doing this will not cause your post to appear at the top of that hashtag feed. Your post will be added to that hashtag feed retroactively. Do with that info what you will...
However, I am suggesting some research into relevant hashtags to your industry, your service/offer/product, and your ICA. Your hashtags should not be the same for every single post. If they are, they're likely not relevant to your post every time like they should be. Keep in mind hashtags are a long-game strategy, too. They help with SEO on Instagram as well as help you be seen over and over again.
4. Content-type: After you've gone through the first three suggestions and you're still looking for more, look at your content type. It helps to bring your insights into mind here as well. What types of content are performing best already? Lean into those by repurposing the content you've already shared. (See example above)
The bottom line for order of operations: start small and work your way up.
How to know if things are working or not with your social media strategy
Saving the best for last because we all want our efforts to yield results, so we need to discuss whether things are working. However, to know if you're creating results, you must have a goal in mind. If you don't have a goal you're not working towards anything.
Bearing this in mind, if there's ONE THING you take away from this post, I want it to start with a goal. This is why I encourage the birds-eye-level view of your year. Seeing things from a high level with your launches, events, time off, and so on allows you to set goals for yourself and your marketing efforts.
For example, if Emily is launching her Master Your Time Group Coaching program in May and selling her program at $2,000 per person, she wants to make $10,000 from this launch. So, she now knows she needs to enroll five people in her program. She can now work backward from Feb to May to figure out how to market her program to get five people to say yes.
The best part of this example is if you're launching something repeatedly, you can start to rinse and repeat by looking at your goals and seeing what converted people and what didn't.
The bottom line on knowing if things are working or not: Are you moving towards your goal, or are you flat-lining or worse on the downslope? Starting with a goal and tracking what is moving you toward it is a good measure of what is working.
Now that you know what it looks like to switch things up, you can confidently keep executing your content plans and tweak things throughout the month to yield the best results.
